Global

Saturday, October 12, 6:30-11pm
1021 E. Broad St., Columbus

Parking inside driveway, on street or rear parking lot
Free, no RSVP required.
614-253-2571, colsfreepress@gmail.com
columbusfreepress.org
Come to network and socialize with progressive friends with refreshments, live music and a presentation by Dr. Bridget Williams and Emilie Ramach.

Despite the corporate hype, Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy are deeply rooted in the mainstream of our nation’s history.

The lie that they’re “foreign ideologies” starts with the fascist assault Woodrow Wilson waged against them during and after
World War 1.

Their marginalization today by corporate Democrats and Trump Republicans is itself profoundly unAmerican.

Here’s the reality (as explained in greater length in my new People’s Spiral of US History):

In the decades after the Civil War, Robber Baron corporations captured the core of the American economy. Led by JP Morgan and John Rockefeller, they pushed family farmers and urban workers deep into the depths of poverty.

In the west and south, agrarian activists formed the People’s (Populist) Party to demand public control over the monopoly capitalist forces that were destroying their lives. Their socialistic platforms demanded democratic rule over the money supply, banks, railroads, telecommunications and much more. They wanted female suffrage, direct election of Senators, referendum and recall.

By World BEYOND War, October 8, 2019

The fourth annual conference of World BEYOND War, which was held on October 4th and 5th in Limerick, Ireland, produced this letter, which is being delivered to Julian Assange.

We are grateful to you for the work you have done exposing criminal activities and abuses of power by militaries and governments. We believe that governments’ (monstrous and criminal) behavior should not be secret. People should know what their government is doing, and what a powerful foreign government is doing to their own countries. The actual results of the work of WikiLeaks have been hugely beneficial.

It is outrageous that you are behind bars for exposing actions far more serious than a recent phone call between Donald Trump and the President of Ukraine, which has political opponents of Trump suddenly claiming to support whistleblowers.

I am honored and humbled to be addressing this gathering at this perilous moment, especially as I am here in place of Kathy Kelly, who sends her love and her regrets that she can’t be here. Mairead Maguire just cited Dorothy Day as an influence in her life- Dorothy took me in when I was a teenage dropout long ago. I stayed at the Catholic Worker in New York then for four years and this made all the difference in my life.

The stark reality that we are facing, even the imminent threat extinction, cannot be clearer than it is today and our work cannot be more crucial.

Along with being where all blood goes, the heart is an enduring metaphor. As Bernie Sanders recovers from a heart attack, now might be a good time to consider some literal and symbolic meanings.

Bernie immediately used his heart trouble to advance a central mission. From the hospital, he tweeted: "I'm fortunate to have good healthcare and great doctors and nurses helping me to recover. None of us know when a medical emergency might affect us. And no one should fear going bankrupt if it occurs. Medicare for All!"

Calcutta-born playwright Dipika Guha’s comedy Yoga Play is the latest installment in the tradition of works about and interactions between “mystical” Easterners encountering Westerners living in the material world who seek enlightenment. As Yoga Play drolly dramatizes, sometimes those partaking of this spiritual quest in our corporeal realm get their wires crossed. The search for inner illumination can be monetized in a society dominated not by piety but by materialism, turning serenity into obscenity and putting the nasty into “Namaste.”

In Guha’s two-acter Jojomon is a multi-national corporation manufacturing garb used by practitioners that is rocked by a scandalous revelation. To counter what could be a monsoon of bad PR Jojomon executive Joan (Susi Damilano, an Off-Broadway and award winning actress from San Francisco, where Yoga Play had premiered), a beleaguered woman competing in the male-dominated corporate world, decides to take desperate measures to save the image conscious company’s reputation (and stock prices).

Sine Nomine Patri is a U.S. citizen who believes in law and order.

Since the Democrats formally launched an impeachment inquiry, tweet-head Donald Trump, who is as of this writing still the Electoral College-appointed U.S. President, tweeted Sept. 29: “I want [Democratic Rep. Adam] Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.....” At 5:12 a.m. the following day the sleep-deprived commando-in-chief tweeted this regarding the Chairman of the House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee’s: “Arrest for Treason?

On Sept. 27, at a private breakfast at the Intercontinental Hotel in Manhattan - where Trump was due to annual U.N. General Assembly meetings - the enraged president squealed about the alleged squealer: “I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Italy Should Make Friends with the US Public and the World By Kicking Out the US Military

By David Swanson

In the late 1980s when I was a teenager and an exchange student in Bassano del Grappa I loved Italy for the same reasons. I found Italians on average to be friendly, kind, generous, loving, fun-loving, humble, self-critical, and intelligent. It was also very cool when I told other young people that I was from the US. Older people told me that the United States had saved Italy from Nazism.

The debate over what actually occurred on 9/11 and, more to the point, who might have been behind it, continues to preoccupy many observers worldwide. There is considerable legitimate concern that the commission that reviewed the incident engaged in a cover-up designed either to excuse a catastrophic failure on the part of the United States’ national security apparatus, or even connivance of federal agencies in the attack itself. And then there is the issue of possible foreign government involvement. The roles of the Saudi Arabian, Israeli and Pakistani governments and security services has never been adequately investigated in spite of the fact that all three countries had clear involvement with the mostly Saudi individuals who have been identified as the attackers. Beyond that, Israel had intelligence operatives that appeared to be celebrating the fall of the twin towers in real time, an involvement in what took place that has never been comprehensively looked at by .law enforcement due to unwillingness to offend the Israelis.

Trump with Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Aka, the Likud Party Half of the “US/Israeli Wannabe Authoritarian Tag-team”)

Israel’s influential center-left newspaper, Haaretz, commented recently on the Netanyahu/Trump relationship:

“The historically deep ties that bind the United States and Israel were profoundly damaged Thursday when the government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu succumbed to pressure from the Trump Administration…’

“The ‘wannabe authoritarian tag-team’ (ie, ‘Trump and Netanyahu’) has committed a reckless, racist, contemptible act driven by stunningly short-sighted political calculations by barring [US House of Representatives members] Omar and Tlaib from visiting Israel. The action will have fateful repercussions…”

It is instructive to recall that in the 1995 campaign for Israeli Prime Minister, a number of violent hate-group protests were organized by Netanyahu’s Likud Party which caused serious divisions in the state of Israel – quite similar to the divisions that have occurred in the US since the campaign for president by Donald Trump.